The need and desire of workplace firms, and the people suppliers who serve them, to efficiently source, administer, and report on temporary and contract workers has been prevalent for a long time in the staffing industry. For a variety of business and economic reasons, the use of interdepartmental, temporary and contract workers has become an increasingly important dimension at a large number of workplace companies. Accordingly, the direct and indirect costs associated with temporary and contract staffing has become a significant component both within individual departments and in these companies as a whole. The aforementioned costs represent an expenditure that companies need to better understand, control, account and report upon.
For many companies, the expenditure for such workers is the largest company expenditure that is not subject to the internal control procedure of a purchase order system. This is primarily because the expenditure for temporary workers cannot usually be quantified prior to the actual incurring of the expense due to overtime rules (and other formula based charges) and both the number of hours and duration of days worked being typically indeterminate at the time of an order. The aforementioned is further complicated by the fact that no single supplier, no matter how large, has a lock on the best people or is competent in providing trained workers for all types of jobs or recruits in all local (geographic) markets. Thus, the company faces the two realities, namely, that it cannot issue purchase orders for the expenditure and it cannot use one supplier as a single point of control and reporting source for the expenditure.
One common response has historically been to establish a single supplier as a “vendor on premise” or “master vendor,” allowing that supplier to have first right of refusal to supply all of the workers needed and requiring them to subcontract to others for whatever need they cannot meet. While this may appear to be an efficient method of streamlining the process, it has historically been very costly and usually breaks down in implementation and reporting.
A second common response has historically been to interject a very inefficient and expensive software middleman (often internet based), referred to as a vendor management system (“VMS”), directly into the procurement and reporting process to allow a measure of control and create proprietary reporting. A VMS is typically installed at one workplace company at a time, much like an enterprise accounting system. Again, while this may also appear to be a good solution, the middleman fee is extremely high for supplier firms in a low margin industry, and the entry and manipulation of data that is required by a VMS makes a supplier literally learn and interface with a new system every time they serve a new client that has deployed a VMS. Further, the reporting provided to the buyer is limited and inflexible. For these reasons and more, certain suppliers decline to use any VMS at all, and the VMS is not accepted by a vast majority of suppliers.
The most common response is, because of the high costs and heavy commitment, to merely decline the possibilities of any control, tracking, and reporting on these types of expenditures. This is often the course taken by companies, especially small and medium sized firms, that buy temporary labor.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a streamlined, inexpensive system where any people supplier can efficiently capture time in multiple, necessary, firm-by-firm customized ways as a reliable foundation for robust reporting and where any buyer of labor such as temporary labor can interface with multiple (e.g., hundreds) of people suppliers in multiple geographic areas and, in that process, self tag time worked on a customized basis peculiar to that buyer (e.g., department codes, expense codes, locations), then easily obtain reporting customized to that buyer on a self serve, instant demand basis. The system should provide like functionality to any supplier of labor in working with a multitude (e.g., hundreds) of buyers.